Writing in a journal as a teenager may be normal, but getting fame for what you’ve written in it is rarely that common. However, that’s what Mackenzie Thomas does, a tiktoker who has gone viral for sharing her innermost thoughts of puberty, crushes, body changes, and punishment, among other things.
Mackenzie Thomas, 24, has put shame to one side and has already amassed more than 440,000 followers on TikTok by posting videos in which she monotonously reads aloud entries from one of her more than 20 old diaries. “How are the kids at school supposed to understand me when my brain is a computer?” she reflects on an entry from 2012. In another scruffy note, written two years later, she documented eating a lip gloss her mother had bought for her: “It was from Sephora. It tasted like vanilla and coconut. And tonight in my room I put everything in my mouth and digested it.
The raw, profanity-filled content of his teenage memoir seems to resonate with many TikTok users, who love that kind of fresh and new content, and who, in turn, represents them.
As stated in a New York Times interview with Mackenzie, the videos overflow with countless comments with the viewers’ mortifying adolescent memories. “It has become a space for people to feel less alone and less strange with themselves,” explains the tiktoker. “If I’m able to turn my past humility and shame into things that make millions of people feel seen, that’s the greatest gift.”
Mackenzie Thomas, who lives in Brooklyn, remembers the first time her mother bought her a newspaper. She was 11 years old and her diary told of past events in New Jersey, where she grew up. Writing down her innermost thoughts was a much-needed outlet, especially as a mixed-race girl.
“My mom is black and my dad is white,” says Mackenzie. “I went to a white, white school, and it wasn’t white enough for those white girls.” She often felt left out in elementary school, so she started writing down everything about herself: the things that kept her up at night, the things that made her laugh, the things she loved, and the things she loved. I hated.
In 2021, Mackenzie graduated from Emerson College with a BA in Comedic Arts, living in Los Angeles, where she opened a TikTok account to post funny videos.
Wondering how to make her followers, and herself, laugh, she turned to her journals. She was already in the habit of reading them when she was feeling down to remind herself that “her problems were really funny,” she said. Why doesn’t she share that same joy with the rest of the world? “I’m too ashamed of myself, and I’ve been over it for a long time.”
Some of the newspaper’s posts have been viewed millions of times. Many are laugh-out-loud funny, even the painful ones are, like a 2016 entry about her mother telling her she had “a creepy alien touch.” In another post, Mackenzie reads an entry about overhearing her father talking about her on the phone, telling someone that he was taking her to violin lessons when she was actually taking her to an improv class.
“These videos are examples of meme culture, as they use humor as a vehicle to delve into shared emotions,” explains Heather Suzanne Woods, an assistant professor of media and communication at Kansas State University. For Professor Woods, “Society may overlook the wisdom of the young as superfluous, but Ms Thomas’ videos give insight into her unvarnished thinking.”
When Sheryl Hadad, one of Mackenzie’s followers, first saw one of the posts, she felt an instant connection. “There was something about the way she says things that makes every situation feel up close and personal, like someone finally saying what we’re all thinking and feeling,” she explains.
Sheryl, 21, even tattooed herself with a line from one of Mackenzie’s diaries that reads: “A wet sack of potatoes knows more about happiness than I do.”